Re: question re: best practices,

[Jim Knoble <jmknoble pobox com>]

Circa 2002-May-11 14:47:05 -0600 dixit Rob Nagler:

: Jeff Johnson writes:
: > Point me at any RPM doco that sez' not to use find to generate
: > %files, and I will eradicate immediately.
: 
: http://www.rpm.org/support/RPM-HOWTO-6.html#ss6.8 sez:
: 
:     This is the section where you must list the files for the binary
:     package. RPM has no way to know what binaries get installed as a
:     result of make install. There is NO way to do this. Some have
:     suggested doing a find before and after the package install. With
:     a multiuser system, this is unacceptable as other files may be
:     created during a package building process that have nothing to do
:     with the package itself.

Oh, my.  This is from Donnie Barnes's RPM-HOWTO, that's about as
old and not-from-this-time-period as those huge statues on Easter
Island that nobody really knows how they got there.

The paragraph you quote was written somewhat before the advent of
'BuildRoot', back when primates first descended from the trees and
specfiles installed files directly into the regular filesystem.  The
'find' it speaks of would have been something like:

  %install
  find / -print0 |xargs -0 ls -ld >before.lst
  make install
  find / -print0 |xargs -0 ls -ld >after.lst
  diff -u before.lst after.lst >pkgfiles.lst

(which, as the paragraph notes, is a cheesy and ineffective way of
figuring out what those screeching and grinding noises you heard during
'make install' actually meant for your filesystem).

-- 
jim knoble | jmknoble@pobox.com | http://www.pobox.com/~jmknoble/